


Station to Station

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Moonage Daydream [1]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Glam Rock, M/M, velvet goldmine au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24989569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Hickey and Gibson arrive in London with the intention of becoming rock stars.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Series: Moonage Daydream [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1773430
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Station to Station

After they left school, he and Billy went to London with the intention of becoming rock stars. They piled off the midnight train from Sheffield and slept on benches in St. Pancras station. It was early summer and the air still heavy with a spring chill. He was too excited to sleep, because his life was finally starting, so he got up around dawn and went wandering around King’s Cross until he found a grocery store with a dumpster out back full of day-old bread and lumpy produce. He shoved everything he could carry in his backpack and went back to St. Pancras, where Billy was wandering aimlessly on the frontage road like a shell-shocked soldier. “Win,” he shouted, staggering with relief, like he’d been hit over the head with something. “Fuck! Oh, thank god!” 

He was too startled to be upset about the name thing. “What happened?” 

“I thought you — well.” 

“Well what?” 

He showed Billy what was in his backpack. They decided they would walk to the Regent’s Park to find a better place to sleep somewhere on the lawn, and to see the wolves. 

“I thought someone had carried you off,” Billy said finally. “I thought you left! I thought you just walked away. I thought maybe I was imagining you the entire time.” 

This latter bit was most disturbing. Billy looked around them on the street and finding it satisfactorily vacant of onlookers took his wrist and pinched the inside of it, hard enough to leave a little bruise. 

“Ow!” 

“You are real, then.” 

“That would have been one hell of a six-year hallucination, Billy!” 

Billy shrugged. “The human mind can do incredible things, under duress.” 

Duress was maybe a nice way of putting it. He had other words for it himself, or maybe there weren't many words at all; there was the sound of pressing all the keys on the organ at once, or the look of a piece of shattered glass: the great void which contained nothing and everything at once. “Hmm,” he said. 

“Win — ” 

He tutted, feeling like his mother. Which was fitting, because he was taking her name, such as it was. 

Billy rolled his eyes. “Do I really have to? I thought it was just for other people.” 

“Even you, Billy.” 

He hadn’t been too keen on changing his own name, which was alright, because Billy Gibson had a kind of American insouciance. 

“Fine,” Billy said, “ _Cornelius_.” 

“Don’t make it sound posh!” 

“It _is_ posh!” He made a face. “You don’t look like a Cornelius.” 

They had had this conversation many times before. Why he was still entertaining it was a mystery. “What do I look like?” 

“You look like a Win to me.” 

“Because you’ve known me by that name since we were eleven.” 

“Hmm,” Billy said. “I think Win Chambers is a fine name.” 

“You’ve said that before. It sounds like a bloody Catholic schoolboy name.” 

“But you are that.” 

“No,” he said evenly, “we’re not anymore.” 

They had gone running together across the dew-wet dusk grass carrying everything belonging to them in the world in their knapsacks, running so fast his chest burned, everything blurred, the field and the woods, the great stately brick buildings arrayed over the sprawling lawns, and he did not look back until he had practically vaulted over the stone wall onto the Abbeydale Road, to check that Billy was behind him. 

“You don’t think we might always be?” 

“I sure as hell hope not.” 

At school, he had been beaten for intentionally playing the devil’s interval over and over on the organ in the chapel during Sunday services. He had been beaten for sneaking in there in the middle of the night to play Doors songs on the very same organ, and for having a guitar and marijuana and a David Bowie cassette and eyeliner in his dorm room, and for receiving fellatio from Billy in the vestry near the cafeteria, for cheating on exams, for violating uniform policy, for smoking cigarettes, for smoking pot, for being out on the grounds at night, for listening to the radio, for skipping class, for skipping detention, for chewing gum, for swimming in the lake… They used a paddle, a switch, a belt, fists… Once one of the teachers had struck him across the face, and another had once laid a wizened old hand inside his thigh. Eventually he stopped caring.

Maybe he kept courting it to see if there was any feeling left anywhere, and it turned out that there wasn’t. That person turned inside out and went away, kind of shrunk into a gold kernel all the way inside his heart, which got blacker every day until he couldn’t feel it anymore. That person was basically dead. This was what was left. This person deserved a new name, because the old one was beginning to feel very small and itchy. His mother was dead, which was the source of everything, but she had been from Limerick and she was called Cornelia. It hadn't seemed fair to Win, and it didn’t seem fair to Cornelius either, that she had never gotten to have a real life. When they had gone through and gotten rid of all her things after she died, he had found her go-go boots in the back of the closet, still in the box, though the leather was worn thin at the ball of the foot, where she would have stepped if she were dancing… 

"What are you thinking about," said Billy. 

“Nothing.” 

“You’re never thinking about nothing.” He laughed. “You’ve never thought about nothing in your life!” 

Billy’s mother was dead too. That was how they had first become friends. Billy’s father was also dead, which Cornelius thought he might have preferred. 

The city, here, in the tangle of streets among the railway tracks and stations, was cobbled together from layers of history. Cornelius had been to London all of once as a child on holiday and they had gone to St. Paul’s and the British Museum and then trundled away back home on the evening train to York, and he fell asleep on his sister’s shoulder as his father spoke about the war, the colonials, Operation Battleaxe in the Hell-Fire Pass, death, empire… And here was the city that was the jewel of the world: dirt and modular housing and all the posh squares of identical white rowhouses, shoveled on top of the plague pits, shedding filth in the rain. The sky smudged gray as though with ash. Every iota of green had been donated by royal magnanimity for the well-being of the teeming masses. It was almost funny. 

“Have you ever been here before,” he asked Billy.

“Here? No. I’m as lost as you.” 

“Never been to London at all?” 

“Never been south of Birmingham until yesterday.” 

“What do you think?” 

Billy laughed. He had a lovely girlish laugh. It was a bright sound, like having dropped a champagne flute on flagstones. “We’ve been here twenty minutes.” 

“I want your first impression.” 

Billy thought for a while. You could see him thinking because his high brow furrowed and there was in infinitesimal trembling of the unslept circles ringing his dark and longing dog’s eyes. “It’s very clean,” he said finally. 

Cornelius laughed. It was a too-big too-bright laugh for such a place and Billy elbowed him in the kidney. “How you know a Mancunian,” he said, delighted. “He says London’s too clean.” 

“I didn't say _too_ clean, I said _very_ clean, and besides, Manchester’s a _real_ city, lived-in like, and don’t you feel like we might be the only people here? Like this is some kind of ghost place? We haven't seen anybody since we left St. Pancras.” 

“It’s Sunday early and the folks around here are posh,” Cornelius said. He had noticed the emptiness too. “What are you going to do about it?” 

“About what?” 

“That there’s no one about. Would you kiss me?” 

Billy shook his head, adamantly, but there was a new flush high in his cheek, like the shadow of a red umbrella. 

“It’s London. Nobody can do anything here.” 

“You really believe that?” 

Cornelius wasn't sure he did, but he was supposed to be the wiser one, so he said nothing at all. They went into the park by the way of Cumberland Gate. There were some people running or pushing babies in prams and far away across the lawn there were some ant-size men in bright shirts playing football. They knew they looked like tramps, and they wandered off the paths under one of the lovely weeping elms, into the cool, damp shadow and the loam where they might not be seen, and set about unpacking the food from Cornelius’s bag. 

“Where’d you get all this?” Billy asked, spreading a bit of soft Stilton on a slice of white bread with his fingers. 

“I don’t think you want to know.” 

Billy paused momentarily with the bread halfway to his mouth and fixed Cornelius with the desperate and confused expression that said, please, I need to trust you, it’s all I have. So Cornelius fixed his own cheese sandwich with a slice of tomato and a few leaves of wilted spinach and ate it and then Billy ate his too. 

They ate quietly, ravenously, the way they had as schoolboys, and then Cornelius lay down in the leaf loam and put his head in Billy’s lap. “So you’re going first, then,” Billy said, but his tone was teasing.

“I got no sleep at all,” Cornelius reminded him. “I got us all the food instead! You owe me.” 

He fell asleep quick, such as it was, quicker than usual, because he was so tired. He didn't dream very often but in this one he was in a dark room trying to wake Billy up, because they had to go, they had to, and he wouldn’t do it alone, he didn’t know if he could… He woke up in an hour’s time, though for a while he thought he was dreaming still, because Billy was touching his hair, moving it away from his temple and the corner of his eye, humming “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” which he had always used to do when it was worst, lying in his cold bed, head in Billy’s lap, with the new marks stinging and sparking where they touched the rough bedclothes. _What costume shall a poor girl wear…_

\--

In those days there was a lot of fuss around a label called Discovery Records, which was headquartered in Knightsbridge, on the edge of Hyde Park. Cornelius and Billy were living, in those early days, in a squat off the Deptford Green, where they slept on the floor, curled together like abandoned runts against the cold, and were obliged to drag cinderblocks in front of the door every night in attempt to preclude the inevitable barging in of fellow squatters looking for money, drugs, or a blowjob, or otherwise so dead drunk as to have forgotten which room was theirs. Cornelius had a knife he’d taken from the biology lab in school and he slept with it close at hand, and eventually people came to know this well enough that they stopped having to put the cinderblocks in front of the door, but by then they were on their way out, anyway. In the early days they would hop the turnstiles to skip the Tube fare and ride across town with the squares and suits to Knightsbridge or South Kensington; they would walk along the Queen’s Gate and the Kensington Road in their thrift-store finery, and they would encamp in front of Discovery Records, looking for John Franklin, or James Fitzjames, or a job. 

There was a very square man, figuratively and literally, who went in and out a few times each day, and at last — it was a Tuesday — he came over. He had a brown bag from a sandwich shop that he gave to Billy, who looked more like a Victorian urchin on account of his very tallness and very thinness. “Are you rentboys,” said the square man flatly. His accent was indistinctly Irish. “Because we have no need for those, and you lads might move on before you starve. You'd have more luck around Notting Hill Gate, so they tell me.” 

Horribly, there was a gentleness about his ravaged old face; he meant the things he said. Billy spluttered a little. “We thank you for your kindness, sir,” Cornelius said. “But we aren't for rent in that respect.” 

The square man cocked an eyebrow that was maybe not exactly surprised. “In what respect, then.” 

“Only the respect in which any man’s labor technically is a commodity that may be rented.” 

“We’ll do anything to work for the label, sir,” Billy said. 

The square man looked between them as though to ascertain how serious they were. Cornelius watched him mentally process pros and cons. Then he turned heel and went on stiffly toward the front door. “Are you coming,” he called. 

They went scampering after him. The building was cool inside, like a sepulcher, and their cheap shoes were loud on the title floor. The ceilings swallowingly high. At the front desk was the strangest and most beautiful woman Cornelius had ever seen, who looked them up and down reproachfully. “Have you finally taken pity on these poor unfortunate souls,” she asked the square man in a delicate voice given weight by irony. 

“Yes, Silna, I have.” 

“You're a better man than I…” 

In his very dark, wood-paneled office, carpeted with unstylish orange shag, the square man bade them sit in a collapsing beige settee and threw open the shade, not that it let in much more light, being as they were backed up on another building and it was the height of the grey of the London summer. In a corner a first pressing of the Kinks’ _Muswell Hillbillies_ was propped against a record player of vintage persuasion. A few other LPs by James Fitzjames and Erebus were framed and hung crookedly on the wall along with certificates authenticating the status of their sales and, resting on the floor, where it looked like it must have fallen, was a case containing some kind of army medal behind cracked glass. On the big stately desk, which was cluttered with papers and dossiers and pens and pencils, a stack of contracts and law books anchored down by a fingerprinted deep-green glass tumbler still with a rime of yesterday’s whiskey around the base, there was a placard which read _F.R.M. Crozier, Esq._

Crozier sat heavily in his leather chair and pulled open a drawer containing a nearly-empty bottle of Highland Black eight-year scotch, which he drained into the tumbler before dropping in a wastebasket under his desk. “What are your names,” he said. 

“Cornelius Hickey.” 

“Billy Gibson.” 

“Hickey, Gibson. Very well. I can pay you cash under the table. Thirty pounds a week, each.” 

Billy audibly gasped. Trying to move only the parts of his arm not visible to Crozier, Cornelius swatted the side of his thigh. 

“For what sort of work, sir.” 

“I’ll need you to pick… things up. All over town, I’m afraid. I can give you tokens for the Tube. Can either of you play any instruments?” 

“Keys for me, strings for Billy, sir,” Cornelius said. 

“Very well. There might be some of that involved: tuning, maintenance. Can you tune a piano, Mr. Hickey, I suspect that our current go-to man has become a junkie, and he still costs me a bloody fortune.” 

“I can, sir.” 

“Very well.” He gestured at the brown bag Billy was still holding in his lap. “Eat up. I’ll make you a list.” 

\--

He woke up with a start. It was dawn and the light in the squalid room was a deep, almost bloody blue, cast like a projected film through the broken window and across every scant thing they owned between them, scattered across the cold wood floor. A skinny arm found its way over his chest and pressed gently in a few places like a quack doctor until a clammy palm settled over his breastbone and set about opening and shutting in a way its owner likely thought was comforting. “Dreaming, love,” Billy said, but he was mostly asleep. “Dreaming, dreaming…” 

His breath was soft and stale against the back of Hickey’s neck. He felt it even out and slow. He lay there watching the daylight grow in the room and he must have fallen asleep again because the next thing he knew the kettle was going on the hotplate and his cock was in Billy’s mouth. It was all so surprising that he came embarrassingly quick and then lay there gasping like a fish while Billy emerged with difficulty from the layers of blankets and took the kettle off the heat. “You have dreams like a dog,” he said hoarsely, touching his mouth with the back of his hand. “Twitching, running…” 

Hickey sat up and zipped himself up. His head was spinning. Billy could never, ever know that he was such a blow job god. “D’you need a hand?” 

“What? Oh.” He grinned that lecherous grin that looked misplaced on his innocent face. “No, I, you know, these pants were ruined anyway…” 

“You can’t walk around with jizz in them all day!” 

“Why not,” Billy said, though he picked up an old sock from the floor and unzipped his fly to slop it around his crotch. “All we’ve got to do is make the rounds of every drug den in London.” 

They had tea and stale biscuits and nicked a newspaper on the way to the tube, where they rode to Hammersmith, and Billy fell asleep on Hickey’s shoulder as he read obituaries. Once they had got there it was nearly nine in the morning, and they walked along the rail tracks, sharing a cigarette. 

“What do you dream about,” Billy asked. 

“I hardly ever remember. What about you?” 

“I had a dream the other night that you met my parents,” Billy told him. “And you were dressed just like that! Like a bloody punk. But they liked you!” 

He was sweet in how he thought they might have approved, had they still been alive; they had been good Lancashire union people who went to church on Sundays and voted Labour and told stories about history, and Billy’s father had taught him to play Beatles songs on an acoustic guitar. A drunken driver had killed them, walking over the Irwell in the early evening. But if they had still been alive, much of this would never have happened at all. 

“I think Crozier and Fitzjames are lovers,” Hickey said, while they loitered on the street outside the hospital for the young doctor who would come down at nine forty-five precisely with pain pills in a paper sandwich bag. 

Billy was sat on the curb, configuring a cigarette out of a few desiccated fag-ends he’d picked out of an ashtray on the tube. He looked up, eyebrow ratcheting up his forehead as though elevated by an unseen crank. “What makes you say that?” 

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” 

Billy scoffed. “No,” he said. 

There was a stiff breeze and so Hickey cupped his hands around Billy’s cupped hands so that the match might stay lit enough to spark the cigarette. 

“Crozier — he’s exhausted by Fitzjames,” Billy mused, exhaling a white-grey cloud, passing the limp fag up to Hickey. “Isn’t he?” 

“Hmm,” Hickey said. He took a drag from the cigarette. “This tastes like death.” 

“It does, doesn’t it…” 

The doctor came out precisely at the agreed-upon hour and they traded the pills for cash. Then they got back on the tube and rode to Battersea, where they met up with a dealer at the old power station and picked up the coke, the reds, the blue tips. They picked up pot, hashish, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, benzos, and assorted methamphetamines. They picked up drugs that they had never heard of before. They went by the record stores and looked at the new arrivals and listened to whatever was playing on the shop speakers, because they couldn’t afford anything; they shoplifted dinner, ate out of dumpsters, day-old bread and produce and dented cans they opened with Hickey’s knife. Sometimes, sitting across from a policeman on the Tube, feeling the drugs in his pockets and knowing Billy’s pockets were similarly stuffed, Hickey wondered if they ought not to go it alone from here, turn all the product straight around, keep the money and buy tickets out of town. After all, he'd given Crozier a false name and there was a glut of Billy Gibsons in England. 

For some reason, they never did. Well, that was a lie; he knew the reason. The reason was that they had not done that which they had come to this place to do. He slept poorly and watched the moonlight move upon the floor, listening to Billy talking in his sleep. I will, he told himself over and over; I will, I will, I will. 

\--

Hickey called the Discovery offices from a telephone box on Boleyn Road in Shacklewell, looking for Crozier, only for Silna to tell them that he and just about everybody else in the office had decamped to Fury Studios in Bermondsey, and that he should probably call over there before they made the trip, just to make sure that they had gotten everything that would be required. Billy came out of the pastry shop just in time for Silna to recite the number over at Fury and Hickey scrawled it on the brown paper sleeve containing the day-old baguette that was likely to be their only meal of that day. Then he called over, waiting long enough for Crozier to come to the phone that he was obliged to pay up another ten pence of his own money, until at last he heard the old man’s shuffles and coughs on the other end of the telly. 

“Is that you, Mr. Hickey,” Crozier said. He wasn’t quite slurring but he was on his way to drunk. 

“Yes sir, and we have everything you asked for, except the reds.” 

Crozier sighed through his nose in such a way that Hickey knew he was pinching the bridge of it in consternation. He looked up to Billy and shook his head. They hadn't even tried to get the reds, because the doctor who gave them out willy-nilly was a creep and all the way in Pimlico besides. 

“Should we bring what we’ve got down to the studio — ” 

“It's quite simply unacceptable, you know,” Crozier said. “I should think those would be the easiest to get.” 

“You'd be surprised, sir, they’re dead popular, they are, and we did get blue tips — ” 

“You must realize that this behavior is suspicious, don't you, Mr. Hickey,” Crozier said. “After all, you could be taking them yourselves.” 

“With all due respect there aren’t enough hours in the day, sir.” 

Billy was leaning up in the doorway of the booth, wide-eyed. Possibly about to watch them lose everything. 

It was all piling up behind his tongue. You work us to the bone. We sleep five hours a night, in a squat, behind an unlocked door propped shut with bricks, because we don't make enough to afford a flat. You send us back and forth across the city to orchestrate assorted sales of extreme illegality all to bulldoze your own bad war memories and keep a man you can’t admit you love from leaving you. Well god I hope he leaves you! 

On the other end perhaps it was piling up behind Crozier's too. Hickey felt for a moment that they could have been lieutenants of opposing factions facing off across a foggy battlefield before the blood. 

“Come on, then,” Crozier said at last. “Clemons and Webster. Take the Overground to Canada Water and walk across the park.” 

Hickey wrote all this down on the baguette bag too. “Yes sir, thank you, sir, give us an hour.” 

\--

At first, being in the presence of James Fitzjames was like standing before some minor god. It got old pretty fast. He was an otherworldly beauty, that much was true. His face shifted rapidly through microexpressions that were each artful enough to have been painted by one of the old masters. He was normally under the influence of something or other: pot if he was writing, uppers and coke if they were recording. And especially if he was in the studio and as such had probably been blowing lines without sleep for the last forty-eight hours, it was easy to get the sense that he saw right through one’s fleshy particulars to the list of salable content at the heart of one’s person. 

On the fateful day, Fitzjames had a session band in to record something he’d written for the new album, about which he was constantly expostulating and gesticulating. The new record was going to have “moribund themes.” It was going to be “a dark gem.” “I want you to look into it,” Fitzjames shouted, “and see nothing — not even yourself.” The session players were all sycophants who nodded profusely. Yes, James, of course, James. Every few hours they would take a break and smoke pot in the back garden or snort coke or shoot up in the men’s bathroom while Hickey and Gibson tuned the instruments, emptied the ashtrays and the bins, mopped spilled beer off the floor, and put the kettle on for tea. Then the band would come back and struggle to play the same eight bars. In the mixing room with the producer, having been sent by Franklin to nominally mind the proceedings, Crozier was steadily making his way through a case of scotch. Likely it had not escaped him, as it had not escaped Hickey, that Discovery had booked two weeks of studio time at great expense for the band to record the entire LP. Now, five days in, they had not managed to cobble together a useable take of a single song. It was a great shame, because the bones of what they were working on sounded stately and staggering, a funereal epic — but nobody could seem to get it right. 

After untold hours, possibly an age of the earth, so that Hickey wasn’t sure what time it was outside, or if time was even still happening — London could have been leveled by nuclear holocaust, and nobody would have noticed — Fitzjames stopped a take with an anguished animal yowl that put everybody’s hair on end. In the mixing booth, Hickey watched Crozier put his head down on the table. Later, the producer James Clark Ross would mix this scream deep into the final cut, where it would be the subject of urban legend for decades to come. At the time, it somehow managed to be equal parts pathetic and demoralizing, even for Hickey and Gibson, who were just there to be errand boys and occasionally exchange expressions of shock and awe at the degree to which the session had become an absolute clusterfuck. 

“Bloody Christ,” Fitzjames howled, spitting. Crozier had long since quit reminding him to be gentle with his voice. “How hard can it bloody be!” 

He whirled on the keyboardist, who cowered like a child. Hickey bit his lip to quell the snicker that had started ticking his throat. Logically he knew these were the best session musicians in London, and that they all had degrees from posh conservatories, and that their technical skills were second to none. It was just that there was no art to how they played, and art was what Fitzjames was asking for. Even Hickey knew that. 

“I’m asking you — Hodgson.” Fitzjames waited until the keyboardist met his eye. “I am asking you to _feel_ the music. That's all! I am asking you to have… one single iota of rhythm somewhere in your shrunken little heart! Is that so hard?” 

Hodgson was watching intently over Fitzjames’ shoulder, as though something there were very interesting. 

“Do you hear a word I’m saying? Am I surrounded by some kind of orchestra of the deaf? That would explain a lot!” 

Hodgson pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and seethed somewhere between rage and grief. Hickey watched Fitzjames lift his merciless attentions away and scour the room for somebody else to humiliate, and the precious silence lifted a kind of veil before him and showed him what to do. 

It was three steps to the piano. He leaned over its beleaguered player and struck the chords himself. 

They walked together, one after the other, more like zombies than like sleepwalkers. They were being lifted, one and then the other, in rough tandem, planting each step deeply into the earth, and then again. He recognized their alchemic desperation and it suffused him, and he sank into the music. 

He was dragged out after possibly seconds or possibly hours by Hodgson’s firm grip upon his wrist, and he surfaced as from underwater, blinking sight back into his eyes. Another silence accompanied the sustained ringing of the final chord. He could feel every eye in the room tracing the rough outline of his insouciance. His mind returned to an old prayerful mantra from school: Whatever happened next was going to be no worse than everything that had happened before. 

“Everybody out,” Fitzjames said. “Everybody! Out!” Except he turned to Hickey. “Not you.”

“My friend,” Hickey said quickly. “He can play bass.” 

“Your _friend,_ where is this friend?” 

Hickey pointed to Billy across the room, who made like he wanted to dissolve into the wall. Fitzjames whirled on him. “Sit down, _friend,_ ” he announced. “Grab that Rick.” 

Billy reached for the white Rickenbacker bass propped in a stand in the corner as though for a chalice he had been told contained a draught of eternal life. 

“Who are you,” Fitzjames said. 

“Cornelius Hickey sir, and that is Billy Gibson.”

“Catholic school?”

“…sir?”

“There’s no need to sir me. I can tell by the look of you. Did you play the organ at your Catholic school?”

“Yes, Mr. Fitzjames.”

For a moment Hickey thought he might say, don’t call me that either. But he didn’t. The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Francis,” Fitzjames announced, “this is the kind of player I want in the future.”

Crozier sighed long-sufferingly from the mixing room. “The schoolboy who delivers your cocaine?”

“I want an organist, like Aretha Franklin. I want them hungry, Francis. Better than those… stuffy tarts.”

Hickey looked up and across the room to Billy, who looked like he’d been hit over the head with something. He was holding the most expensive instrument he had likely ever touched. Perhaps it was the most expensive object of any kind that he had ever touched. Their eyes met and Hickey recalled a similar look that they had exchanged in the dean’s office on the occasion that they had been caught _in flagrante_ in the vestry. 

On that occasion, as in this one, the trick was shaping yourself to what the person with the power wanted to hear. You just couldn’t stay in that shape very long, or you would get stuck in it. 

“And,” Fitzjames was still shouting to Crozier in the mixing room, “get that bastard in here.” 

Crozier's voice came through tinnily with an air of extreme exhaustion. “Which bastard, James.” 

“That guitar player from — god damn. That kind of primitive rock act — we saw them last month at the Palladium.” 

“The Commandos?” Crozier asked. They were one of the hottest groups in London — you could not get in the door to see them in the clubs, unless you knew somebody — but they weren’t a glam rock group by any stretch of the imagination. “You mean Sol Tozer?” 

“Yes, that bastard. I want him in here yesterday!” Then he whirled on Hickey, displacing patchouli-smelling air. “Do you think you can play these chords,” Fitzjames said, “just like you did? With an air of apocalyptic chagrin?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Do you — ” he pointed at Billy, who withered — “do you think you could play the bass with an air — ”

“Yes sir, apocalyptic chagrin, sir.” 

“What do you intend to do about percussion, James,” said Crozier from the mixing booth. 

“You get in here and sit behind the kit and just give me a count of four, you can do that, can’t you?” 

There was a silence from the booth. Finally Crozier said, “I’m calling Des Voeux.” 

Fitzjames pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He had sweat through his blue shirt. “Fine,” he exhaled, as though this were the most not-fine situation possible. As though Crozier had suggested calling in Charles Manson or Pete Best. “We’ll run it through. Mr. Hickey, you're going to have to give me a steady beat on that piano, if we have no drummer.” 

We had a perfectly good drummer five minutes ago, Hickey didn’t say. “Of course, sir.” 

Billy piped up. “He’s like a — ” He stopped when Hickey and Fitzjames fixed him. “A little metronome,” he said finally. “We used to call him.” 

Hickey bit his lips together tightly inside his mouth, immersing himself in the sheet music. “How charming,” said Fitzjames. 

The piece started and moved with the two opposing chords for a long while until it shifted. Later on, there was a ghostly little organ line and then it shifted into a rollicking, high-stepping riff. He could hear it happening inside his head just looking at the notation. In another life, he might have prayed to god that Billy could manage the bass. Together the two instruments laid down a tight enough rhythmic groove, even sans drums, for a guitarist and vocalist to lead the charge. 

“Let’s run it,” Hickey said. “Billy?” 

He was looking through the sheets. He was a little pale, but, gamely, he said, “I’m ready.” 

“Mr. Fitzjames?” 

“Yes, boys, let’s run it… remember, apocalyptic chagrin.” 

Hickey struck the paired chords again from the top. Billy came in seamlessly after a few bars, watching him closely. Fitzjames stalked between them like some kind of starved predatory cat.

Even without the other instruments, Hickey could hear the song develop. With just the keys and the bass it was almost grotesquely skeletal — in every way a death march. Moribund themes indeed. Then the plodding rhythm dropped away and Fitzjames’ vocals soared into the mix. 

It was something else hearing him sing like this. It put a chill up Hickey’s back, if he was being honest. Strangely, Hickey wished he could see Crozier's face. He became convinced that the expression it would bear would be one of grief, and he played that grief, careful to keep it withdrawn enough to match Crozier’s temperament. It was not unlike the unique childhood grief of seeing a gaggle of fluffy yellow goslings clustered around their mother’s feet by the lake in the morning and then every week seeing fewer and fewer until there were just two or three and they were big and ugly and then they were indistinguishable from their parents and then they went migrating onward and you never saw them again. A grief of tender love ever preceding loss. He put every shred of such feeling into the piano as it moved inexorably through each station of sentiment and at last to the grand conclusion. They played the coda for what felt like hours, until Fitzjames signaled with a closed fist and they brought it to a halt. The sound echoed in the white room. None of them so much as breathed. At last the P.A. from the mixing room patched in. “We got it,” said Crozier. 

The dust slowly settled. Billy put the Rickenbacker back on the rack gently as though it were some kind of weapon with which he had just wreaked mass destruction. Fitzjames collapsed into a chair with the performative fatigue of an exhausted diva, as though he had just delivered some kind of strenuous aria. This mental image was missing a cadre of well-oiled servingmen with palm frond fans, Hickey considered. 

Fitzjames was peering between him and Gibson as though he had been asked to name the ways they were similar and different. “I bet you two were terrors in school,” he said. 

“Terrors? W—Cornelius was, sir.” 

Fitzjames looked to Hickey delightedly. “Is that so?” 

Hickey shrugged. He turned back to the keys and started playing Roxy Music’s “2HB.” 

“You should have seen him, sir,” Billy went on. “The nuns said he had no regard for common decency.” 

Not one to be ignored, Fitzjames got up, waltzed over to the piano, and leant against it, folding his arms over his chest contemplatively. “And yet he has such an angelic comportment,” he observed. 

“Yes,” Billy said. His voice was warm, like the single moth-eaten wool blanket they were still sleeping under together in those days. He was really going to do this, all nine stone of him, he was going to go toe to toe with one of the most famous men in the world. “He does, doesn't he…” 

Something was bothering him, had been bothering him, looking at Fitzjames, Hickey realized. This squirming little worm of something like contempt. All of a sudden the chorus of Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” hit him like a herd of stampeding animals: _oh, god, I could do better than that…_

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this AU is a coproduction of myself and [reserve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve). 
> 
> bowie's ["queen bitch"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5P63qGTm_g)  
> bowie's ["station to station"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpIhsGg2SJ0) \-- not only did this song provide the title for this story, but it is the song i imagine that fitzjames, hickey, and gibson are recording.


End file.
